Mauthausen Death Statistics

Dead prisoners at Mauthausen
concentration camp

Death statistics for Mauthausen are typically
given for the whole Mauthausen complex, including the 49 permanent
sub-camps, whereas the number of deaths claimed for the other
Nazi concentration camps usually include only the deaths in the
main camp. Estimates by historians of the number of deaths at
Mauthausen vary considerably, ranging from a low of 35,000 deaths
in the main camp to a high of over 2 million deaths in the whole
complex. The most widely quoted figures, in the books that I
read for my research, are 100,000 deaths out of a total of 200,000
prisoners in the main camp and all its sub-camps.It seems that there are no official figures available
for the Mauthausen camp, despite the fact that the camp records
in the main camp were intact when the camp was liberated.

The Museum at Mauthausen puts the total
number of deaths in the whole Mauthausen system at 105,000. Mauthausen
was a camp for the most hard-core prisoners including the most
dedicated Communists who would have had a motive for exaggerating
the death statistics for the camp. The Soviet occupation of Austria
lasted until 1955. The Memorial Site at Mauthausen was set up
in 1949 during this time of Communist influence.

The Gusen camp was opened in 1940 and
it did not become a sub-camp of Mauthausen until 1944. It was
the largest of the 49 permanent sub-camps of Mauthausen. In the
five years that the Gusen camp was in existence, an estimated
37,000 to 40,000 prisoners died there.

At the Nuremberg International Military
Tribunal, which started proceedings against 22 Nazi war criminals
in November 1945, a set of seven death books with the title "Totenbuch
- Mauthausen" on the cover of each one, was introduced by
an American prosecutor as Document Number 493-PS, Exhibit Number
USA-251. These death books had been confiscated from the Mauthausen
main camp by the American liberators. The death books covered
the period from January of 1939 to April of 1945, according to
the American prosecutor who said, "They give the name, the
place of birth, the assigned cause of death, and time of death
of each individual recorded. In addition each corpse is assigned
a serial number, and adding up the total serial numbers for the
5-year period (sic) one arrives at the figure of 35,318."
The death books did not include the deaths in the sub-camps.

By way of comparison, the total number
of recorded deaths in the main camp at Buchenwald, a camp for
Communist political prisoners and German criminals that opened
in 1937, was 34,375 according to camp records released by the
U.S. Military. The total number of registered deaths at Dachau,
in the 12 years that it was in operation, was 31,951, according
to camp records turned over to the Red Cross by the American
liberators. The total deaths at Sachsenhausen were around 30,000
according to the USHMM and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The Soviet
liberators never released the Sachsenhausen death books, if any
were ever found, so the figure of 30,000 is an estimate.

Included in the seven death books found
in the Mauthausen main camp were records of prisoners, listed
alphabetically, who had been executed at one-minute intervals,
although the cause of death was listed as "heart failure."
William Shirer wrote in his book "The Rise and Fall of the
Third Reich" that all of the 35,318 prisoners, whose deaths
were recorded at Mauthausen, were executed. He did not mention
how many died of disease at Mauthausen, where there was a catastrophic
typhus epidemic in the last four months before the liberation.

The Mauthausen death books did not include
statistics from the period between August 8, 1938, when the camp
opened, and December 31, 1938. According to Hans Marsalek, a
former inmate in the camp, there were 36 deaths in 1938. In May
1945, during the final days before the American liberators arrived
on May 5th, there were around 300 prisoners dying of disease,
malnutrition and exhaustion each day in the main camp. These
deaths were not recorded in the death books because the camp
had been turned over to the Austrian police and most of the staff
members had escaped.

In addition, there were 3,000 deaths
at Mauthausen after the Americans liberated the camp, according
to Martin Gilbert, author of a book entitled "Holocaust."
Those who died after the liberation succumbed to disease or were
killed by their fellow inmates after the prisoners were released.
Many also died from eating too much of the rich food given to
them by the Americans, according to Gilbert.

Shortly after the Mauthausen camp was
liberated by American soldiers on May 5, 1945, it was turned
over to the Soviet Union because it was located in the Soviet
zone of Occupation. The camp records, which were released by
the Soviet Union in 1947, show that there were 122,767 prisoners
at Mauthausen, including all the sub-camps. These figures probably
do not include the prisoners from other camps who arrived in
the sub-camps of Mauthausen after most of the SS staff had left
in the last days before the American liberators arrived and thus
were not registered.

Remarkably, the Soviet records show that
only 235 Austrians died at Mauthausen. Mauthausen was the first
Nazi concentration camp to receive foreign prisoners; it was
not a camp that was particularly for Austrians, nor was it a
camp that was specifically designed for killing the Jews. It
was mainly a camp for resistance fighters from Nazi occupied
countries, such as France and the Netherlands, and for German
"career criminals."

In March 1946, there was an American Military Tribunal conducted at Dachau,
in which 61 men associated with the Mauthausen camp were put
on trial. The prosecutor, Lt. Col. William D. Denson stated in
his closing argument that "in excess of seventy thousand
prisoners were killed between 1942 and the liberation in 1945."
He did not mention how many had died from disease in that period
of time. The charges against the Mauthausen staff covered only
the period during which America was involved in World War II.

Immediately after the war, Mauthausen
was a refugee camp for Displaced Persons. Jewish survivors of
Mauthausen, who were refugees in the camp, claimed that 180,000
Jews had died at Mauthausen and its sub-camps.

After the Mauthausen main camp was liberated,
the Spanish prisoners produced death records which showed that
16,310 Spanish Republicans had died in the whole Mauthausen complex.
There were also Russian POWs, British spies, Communists, German
criminals, Gypsies, asocials, homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses
at Mauthausen. If the total number of their deaths is added to
the figures given by the Jews and the Spaniards, the grand total
comes to well over 200,000 deaths, which is greater than most
of the estimates of the number of prisoners registered in the
camp.

The total number of prisoners at the
main camp and all the subcamps, in the almost 7 years that Mauthausen
was in operation, was just under 200,000, according to the US
Holocaust Memorial Museum, and "Of these about 119,000 prisoners
are believed to have died in Mauthausen and its subcamps. A third
of them were Jewish."

The 1957 edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, Volume 10 p. 288, mentions that in the Mauthausen
concentration camp "about 2 million people, Jewish for the
major part, were exterminated between 1941 and 1945." Since
the camp was in existence for three years before 1941, this would
put the number of deaths in Mauthausen at well over 2 million.

By 1986, the Encyclopedia Britannica
had revised its figures to read: "out of the probable 355,000
inmates passing through Mauthausen and its satellites, more than
122,000 died from execution or privation."

Mauthausen was one of the top four camps
in Greater Germany, the other three being Dachau, Sachsenhausen
and Buchenwald. In January 1941, Dachau and Sachsenhausen were
designated as Class I camps, where political prisoners had a
chance of being released; Buchenwald was a Class II camp for
prisoners who were considered harder to rehabilitate. Mauthausen
and Gusen was designated the only Class III camps where conditions
were more severe and prisoners had to do hard time, working in
the quarries.

Mauthausen was a "punishment camp"
where the harsh treatment could be expected to result in more
deaths. It was also a camp where condemned prisoners were sent
to be executed. However, condemned prisoners were also sent to
Dachau and Sachsenhausen to be executed; these prisoners are
sometimes included in the death toll even though they were not
registered, causing the death rate to seem higher than it actually
was.

The main Mauthausen concentration camp,
on a hilltop 2.5 miles from the center of the charming town of
Mauthausen, had a capacity of around 12,000 prisoners and only
one prisoner was ever released after 1941. Juan Bautista Nos
Fibla was released in August 1941. The Commandant of Mauthausen,
Franz Ziereis, said that there were never more than 19,800 prisoners
in the main camp at any one time.

In his book, "The 186 Steps,"
author Christian Bernadac wrote that the last prison number to
be assigned at Mauthausen was number 120400, given to Majleck
Tenenbaum, a French Jew. Some of the prison numbers were used
again after the original holder of the number had died. The last
prison death to be recorded at Mauthausen, before the liberation,
was that of Xavier Tabac, a French prisoner who had only recently
arrived and had been assigned prison number 120388.

Martin Gilbert wrote in his book entitled
"Holocaust" that 30,000 prisoners died at Mauthausen
in the last four months of the war, including those that died
from disease. This figure corresponds to the statistics from
the other major Nazi camps in Greater Germany where approximately
half of the deaths were in the period from January 1945 to May
1945 as over-crowded conditions caused typhus epidemics to rage
out of control.

David Wingate Pike, author of "The
Spanish Holocaust," wrote that there were 83,249 prisoners
at Mauthausen and its sub-camps in March 1945. If both Pike and
Bernadac are correct, this means that around 23,000 prisoners
died at Mauthausen in just the last two months of the war. In
view of the fact that there was a typhus epidemic in the camp,
these figures are entirely possible.

A 45-minute movie shown at the Mauthausen
museum does not give any death statistics for the camp; the film
is heavily slanted towards the Communist point of view, although
the word Communist is never mentioned. The narrator in the movie
speaks of "industrial mass murder" at Mauthausen and
says that Russian POWs were "exterminated" there. The
typhus epidemic which claimed thousands of lives in the camp
is never mentioned in the movie.

In the movie shown at the Museum, an
American soldier, who was among the liberators of the camp on
May 5, 1945, stated that "we must have buried 12,000 bodies"
at the Mauthausen main camp. He then added that around 1,200
were buried the first day and 300 per day afterwards, indicating
that around 300 prisoners per day were dying in the immediate
aftermath of the liberation. However, he did not mention the
cause of death for these 12,000 prisoners, and he did not mention
that it was Austrian civilians, not the American soldiers, who
buried the bodies after the camp was liberated.

In spite of the fact that prisoners at
all the Mauthausen camps were dying of typhus faster than the
bodies could be cremated, the gassing of prisoners continued
until the very end, even while the Red Cross was evacuating prisoners
from the camp, according to many accounts given by the survivors.
Christian Bernadac, author of "The 186 Steps," quotes
the testimony of Maurice-Georges Savourey on May 4, 1945 at La
Plaine, near Geneva, immediately after he was taken out of the
camp by the Red Cross convoy. Savourey's testimony from Choumoff's
book is quoted below from Bernadac's book:

...The day on which the first Red
Cross convoy left, Saturday, April 21, 1945, out of two thousand
men...one hundred, exhausted by the short route to be covered,
were led to the gas chamber and executed...One (sic) Sunday,
the 22nd, one hundred fifty men went to the gas chamber; on Monday,
the 23rd, eighty men met the same fate...; on Tuesday, the 24th,
one hundred eighty, in two groups, all Slavs, were gassed. One
of them broke away, ran through the "free camp" in
his nightshirt, stumbling, not knowing which way to turn, made
his way back to camp 3. There he was retaken by the S.S. and
the inner camp police, and returned for execution in the gas
chamber. In addition, some forty French were said to have been
gassed.

Choumoff, who was a prisoner in the Gusen
camp, wrote several books about Mauthausen. In one book, he gave
the exact number of prisoners who were gassed at the main camp,
which he said was 3,455. In another book about the gas chambers
at Mauthausen, he gave the approximate number of victims gassed
at the main camp as 4,000 with an additional 1,560 victims killed
in the Sauer truck which drove back and forth between Mauthausen
and Gusen, gassing prisoners on the way. He wrote that 800 prisoners
were gassed in the barracks at Gusen and between 4,600 and 8,000
prisoners from Gusen and Mauthausen were taken to Hartheim Castle for gassing. Choumoff estimated
that the total number of Mauthausen and Gusen prisoners who died
as the result of being gassed was 34,000.

According to Bernadac, at the time of
the liberation on May 5, 1945, there was a combined total of
approximately 60,000 survivors in the main camp and all the sub-camps.
Franz Ziereis confessed on his deathbed that 65,000 prisoners
had died at Mauthausen. If the records released by the Soviet
Union after the war are correct, that means that the death rate
at Mauthausen was around 50%, which is twice the death rate of
the other camps in the Greater German Reich.

In May 1945, at the time of the liberation,
there were an estimated 20,000 survivors at the main camp at
Mauthausen, 30,000 at Ebensee and an additional 25,000 at Gusen.
These estimates were given by 3 different people and the total
adds up to more than the 60,000 survivors that Christian Bernadac
claims were in all the camps combined.

The large population of prisoners at
Gusen and Ebensee was due to the fact that these camps were an
"end destination" for prisoners who had been evacuated
from other camps as the Allied Armies approached, according to
Robert Abzug in his book "Inside the Vicious Heart."

In February 1945, Jews who had survived
Auschwitz-Birkenau began arriving at Mauthausen, exhausted and
near death after enduring the final evacuation march out of the
camp and then a long train ride, sometimes in open boxcars. In
the final days of the war, thousands of concentration camp inmates
died on a death march, as the prisoners were sent from one camp
to another because Hitler did not want them to be released by
the Allies to wreak havoc on the civilian population.

Evelyn Le Chene, a former inmate at Mauthausen,
wrote that there were 64,000 survivors in the camp when it was
liberated, which would mean a death rate of approximately 50%
if the figures released by the Soviet Union are correct.

Martin Gilbert puts the total number
of survivors in the Mauthausen complex at 110,000, a figure that
probably includes the prisoners who arrived from other camps
in the last days of the war. Gilbert wrote, in his book entitled
"Holocaust," that the Mauthausen survivors included
28,000 Jews. However, there were only 122,767 prisoners in the
Mauthausen camp and all of its sub-camps, according to the figures
released by the Soviet Union in 1947.

The Encyclopedia Judaica states that
212,000 inmates survived their imprisonment in the Mauthausen
complex, a number that is much higher than the total inmate population.

The Museum at Mauthausen has a display
which says that there was a combined total of 13,701 Jewish men
and 611 Jewish women in the main camp and all the sub-camps of
Mauthausen on March 30, 1945. The combined total of all prisoners
at Mauthausen on that date was 78,754 men and 2,252 women in
the main camp and all the sub-camps. The total number of prisoners
at the main camp on March 30, 1945 was 13,852 men and 1,238 women,
according to the Museum. In the final six weeks before the camp
was liberated, there were many more prisoners who arrived and
were probably not counted, as all the camps disintegrated into
chaos.